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Southeast European
Politics Online
Serbia's
Bulldozer Revolution: Conditions and Prospects
ERIC
D. GORDY
Clark
University / Collegium Budapest
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The
change of regime in Serbia in October came as a surprise to most people
both inside and outside the country. Although surveys in the months before
the election were fairly consistent in suggesting that the opposition
would win at least a plurality, this was by no means universally accepted
as a prediction of the future. In the first place, voter surveys of this
type are notoriously unreliable when they are carried out in environments
where answers are heavily consequential and might not be given freely,
like Milosevic's Serbia. In the second place, experience from previous
elections persuasively suggested that there was no reason to expect that
the results would be consistent with the way people voted. In the third
place, there was no confidence that Milosevic would recognize the results
of an election he did not win. So in the two months leading up to the
election, it was the consensus in reports by several international
governments and monitoring agencies that no great changes ought to be
expected from the elections which took place on 24 September.
I
can also count myself among the people who were surprised. Of the visits I
have made to Belgrade over the past ten years, the one I made in the
summer of 2000 (I left the day before the elections were called) was the
most depressing and dispiriting so far. The political opposition, which
had achieved a measure of unity earlier in the year, divided again after
another conflict between SPO and the rest of the opposition parties. The
regime was making extensive use of repressive laws on media and university
regulation which had been forced through during the "state of
emergency" over Kosovo in 1998, and was prepared to put through a new
"law against terrorism" which defined terrorism extremely
broadly. With the takeover of Studio B and Radio B92 in May, and the
constant jamming of Radio Index, there were no independent electronic
media available in the city. The signs of what appeared the success of the
regime in the destruction of alternatives seemed to be reflected in the
cultural scene as well. People I knew who had been actively engaged in
various kinds of antiwar and antiregime activities had withdrawn. Among
the few new offerings of independent rock 'n roll music available was an
album by the group Jarboli with the single track "Revolucija,"
which featured the chorus "u nama je zauvek umrla" (it has died
in us forever). One factor which provided a consistent contrast to this
was the student resistance organization "Otpor!," whose members
continued to produce clever and pointed materials and public
manifestations despite harassment which included the arrest of over a
thousand of their members in the period between May and August.
Nonetheless it was hard to find exceptions to a general atmosphere of
hopelessness and defeat, and the sense that the regime could very well
travel a long distance further on the power of inertia.
By
now I think everybody here knows what happened in the meantime. Elections
were held on 24 September, with the opposition coalition DOS (Demokratska
opozicija Srbije) gaining a convincing majority of votes. The regime
attempted by a variety of means to falsify the results, to prevent their
publication, to force a second round, and finally, in a Supreme Court
decision on 4 October, to nullify the election. The following day
protesters from around Serbia converged on Belgrade, and by the end of the
day they had taken over the federal Parliament and the state television,
and had faced down threats of intervention by the military and the police.
One action--the breaking of the police cordon around the state television
headquarters by a driver using heavy construction equipment--gave the
events a name: the "Bulldozer revolution." Within a week they
had at least nominal control over most civilian centers of power and
secured the exit from power of Slobodan Milosevic.
The
questions I want to ask now are general ones. First, what happened to make
the opposition finally come together in October of this year? And second,
to what extent is the change of regime a real historical break with the
Milosevic regime? I want to ask, that is, why did the "bulldozer
revolution" happen, and did it matter?
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